number 34 • Winter 2018

Authors

Nathan Keyfitz

articles

AMERICAN social security payments by wage earners and their employers in 1977 reached $95 billion. This compares with $140 billion of all personal savings plus undistributed corporation profits. The first figure can be looked at as the savings of working people against the contingencies of old age and sickness; the second, as mainly the voluntary savings of the more affluent for whatever purposes more affluent people save. To those who earned the money the two categories are equally savings, in the sense that they represent abstention from current consumption.

THE economic base of the American graduate school is the undergraduate college. More than half of the 35,000 men and women who receive Ph.D.’s each year expect to become teachers in the nation’s colleges. But although their main economic opportunities lie in teaching, their graduate-school training centers on research, as does their hope for a distinguished career. Graduate school is an apprenticeship, conducted under a mature scholar, for a career of research; those too easily discouraged by the difficulties of creating new knowledge or not strongly enough motivated by its excitements tend to drop out, or never enter. Graduate study is poor in immediate rewards, but rich in the hope of eventual distinction and even material comfort.

CHRISTOPHER JENCKS has raised in a novel and original form the old question of inequality. Underlying his book Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America (Basic Books, 1972, $12.50) is the assumption that successive additions to a person’s income provide diminishing returns in happiness, and hence that the simplest and most efficient way to increase total happiness is for the rich to give to the poor. No empirical data are likely to prove or disprove this statement. Everyone believes it in some degree; no one accepts it absolutely. Jencks knows that his data cannot decide such matters, and he is straightforward enough to tell us at the outset that equality is what he, personally, favors. We shall return to this basic point later. Meanwhile, there is much in Jencks’s study that does have a substantial relation both to empirical data and to social policy in specific areas.